Monday, March 16, 2015

Reverberation, which just closed at
Hartford Stage in Hartford, Connecticut, is the first play I’ve seen by Matthew
Lopez, whose The Whipping Man was
well received in New York in 2011. Reverberation
is a brand-new play about the debilitating consequences of grief and the
interplay of loss and sexuality. Its thirty-five-year-old protagonist, Jonathan
(the Canadian-born actor Luke MacFarlane, best known for the TV series Brothers and Sisters), has lived alone
in Queens since his partner of fifteen years, Gabriel, was beaten to death in
front of his eyes. His grief has paralyzed him.He works out of his apartment, rarely venturing outside; he doesn’t keep
up with friends; he turns down his parents’ offer to visit them in Oregon for
Thanksgiving or Christmas. His only ongoing contact with the world is in the
form of one-night stands with men he meets on Grindr, and he prefers them to
visit him and gets rid of them when the sex is over. That’s what happens in the
opening scene, where he has an intense sexual encounter with Wes (Carl
Lundstedt), who’s twenty-three and so knocked out by the experience that he’s
eager to see Jonathan again. “You fuck like you invented it,” he tells Jonathan,
and a month or two later, when he gets up the nerve to come around to see him
again, he’s both more graphic and more lyrical about what made Jonathan a more
powerful, and also more poignant, lover than anyone else he’s known. By then we’ve
figured out that Jonathan’s sexual performance is his way of holding onto his
life with Gabe – of channeling those emotions once more – but he can only
parcel them out in discrete, limited interactions.

But
by the time Wes rings his doorbell a second time, Jonathan has found a friend.
Claire (Aya Cash) moves in upstairs, into the apartment Jonathan used to share
with Gabe but abandoned after his murder, and is so aggressive about offering
her friendship that she breaks down his practiced resistance to any kind of
intrusion into his private life. Initially she makes the mistake of assuming he
might want to sleep with her. Once they both recover from that embarrassment,
and her need for comfort after an evening with an abusive date evokes his
compassion – he shares his bed with her (in a non-sexual way) so that she feel
safe and cared for – she becomes his pal, his confidant and practically his
roommate. On the nights when he wakes up from nightmares, she reciprocates his
generosity. By act two, however, it’s clear that their intimacy has become, for
him, an unhealthy substitution for the loss of Gabriel.

Carl Lundstedt and Luke Macfarlane. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Reverberation holds you,
and all three of the characters feel real, three-dimensional, and I don’t think
that’s a small feat. Contemporary American playwrights tend to use characters
to make points (as Bathsheba Doran does in The Mystery of Love and Sex, the last new play I reviewed), and contemporary
American plays with gay protagonists are more likely to employ characters as
exhibits in sexual-political screeds (Casa
Valentina, Mothers and Sons, The Nance). Lopez puts the characters
first – not just Jonathan but Claire and Wes; he isn’t interested in lecturing
the audience. Not all his ideas are good ones, though: for instance, Jonathan
designs sympathy cards, which, he explains to Claire, find words for the things
that are too hard for people to say for themselves. (Lopez underscores the
meaning of Jonathan’s job when he tells her about Gabe’s death, and her
response is “I don’t know what to say.” Case in point.) Sometimes he falls into
the trap, especially tempting for young playwrights, of writing set-piece
speeches. There’s one in the first scene, delivered by Jonathan to Wes, about
the tactile quality of books that you don’t remotely believe a man who’s
retreated from the world would say to a pick-up he’s trying to hustle out the
door. (Plus it’s a device: Lopez needs to find a way for Jonathan to send Wes
off with a copy of one of his favorite books, James Baldwin’s Another Country, to prepare his return
in the second act.) And Jonathan’s speech to Claire about Gabe’s murder feels
more like an audition piece, which is how MacFarlane performs it.

The
play falls apart at the end. When Wes comes back and talks about what their
night together meant to him, his perspective is unexpected and even moving. But
when he recounts their initial online exchange about movies and his surprise
when Jonathan kissed him, you wonder if Lopez has forgotten the narrative
set-up. Isn’t the idea of Grindr that it’s an easy, immediate means of finding
sex partners? The real problem, though, is the Hollywood-thriller twist at the
end, which (a) cheapens the drama and (b) doesn’t make sense when you run the
plot back through your head (which is true of most such twists).

Jonathan
is an extremely challenging role that doesn’t fully work; MacFarlane struggles
with it, but the struggle is impressive, and even when he can’t quite get on
top of the character, it’s an admirable performance. Lundstedt, a recent
Carnegie Mellon graduate, is extremely touching as Wes; this is the kind of
acting that deserves to kick-start a young actor’s career. And Cash shows both
comic and dramatic range in the role of Claire. The three performers have been
sensitively directed by Maxwell Williams, in a show that boasts superb
production values: a fine two-level set by Andromache Chalfant, dynamic
lighting by Matthew Richards, and costumes for Claire that manage to both
articulate qualities in the character and give us a sense of how Jonathan sees
her. (One of her outfits is a dress he buys her as a gift.) As a play, Reverberation balances virtues and
faults; as a production, it telescopes the distance between Hartford and New
York.

I
felt pummeled by The Colored Museum,
George C. Wolfe’s 1986 play, which Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company has
mounted on its Boston University mainstage. The last show I saw that was as
smug, self-congratulatory and assaultive as The Scottsboro Boys, the screeching musical tirade about race by
Kander and Ebb and David Thompson that Susan Stroman directed on Broadway five
years ago, in which the notorious incident of the railroaded black men accused
of raping a white woman was put in the form of a minstrel show. Wolfe’s equally
obvious idea is to present late-twentieth-century African-American culture as a
series of exhibits: the soldier dying in the jungles of Vietnam, the prettified
models on the pages of Ebony, the
Afro-versus-straightened-hair debate, the coked-up clubbing drag queen and so
forth. The preface, “Git on Board,” where a stewardess on a time-traveling
airplane instructs her passengers to put on their shackles, reveals Wolfe’s
point of view in the first couple of minutes: a century and a quarter after
emancipation, blacks are still no better than slaves – to vanity, fashion and
self-delusion as well as racism. Man, does Wolfe ever think he’s clever,
dropping one leaden irony after another. If you were lucky enough to drift off
to sleep at the end of Exhibit #1 (“Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel,” where a down-home
TV chef whips up a shawl of little black figurines that hangs around her neck
like an albatross) and didn’t wake up until the finale, you’d still get the
whole picture.

Never having seen any previous productions of
the play, I couldn’t say if Billy Porter’s direction is overstated or merely
renders the script as Wolfe intended it to be performed; my guess is that it’s
pretty much a fait accompli on the
page. The six members of the cast – Nathan Lee Graham, Capathia Jenkins, Ken
Robinson, Shayna Small, Rema Webb and the dreadlocked percussionist Akili Jamal
Haynes – work up a righteous sweat, and you can be impressed by their talent
and energy even as it wears you down. The monologues are punishingly
attenuated, and a sketch called “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” which takes
on all of the drama Wolfe rejects as bourgeois – i.e., pretty much anything
that’s appeared on Broadway that he didn’t have a part in, as either writer or
director – feels interminable. (The only moment in it that perked me up was
Jenkins’ impression of Jennifer Holliday in Dreamgirls.) One scene, “Symbiosis,” has a promising comic premise
– an assimilated black man (Robinson) throws away all the emblems of his rebel
sixties-seventies youth as the symbol of his younger self (Graham) protests –
and ends well (he can’t let go of the Temptations singing “My Girl”), but in
between Wolfe can’t resist turning it into yet one more lecture.

Indignation
and outrage can fuel satire, though, as Voltaire and Swift and the Brecht of The Threepenny Operaknew, they’re only
dramatically effective if they’re transformed. Contempt has no place in satire
at all, and that’s the prevailing tone of The
Colored Museum. It may cheer Wolfe to think that he’s superior not only to his
subjects but to his audience, but that attitude works a kind of reverse magic
on his play: the contemptuous becomes the contemptible. Both Jelly’s Last Jam, the Jelly Roll Morton
musical he wrote and directed for the late, great Gregory Hines, and Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk,
his tap-dancing extravaganza starring Savion Glover, suggested that African-American musical performers who succeeded in crossing the color barrier and
making a hit with white audiences, like Morton and Louis Armstrong and Billie
Holiday, were merely kissing the Man’s ass. Next season he’llbe adapting the legendary 1921 black
vaudeville show Shuffle Along into a
musical about the original
production, to star Glover and Audra McDonald.Caveat emptor.

– Steve Vineberg
is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.